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Sadhguru's Birthday—Sathsang

Sadhguru's Birthday—Sathsang

"It has been thirty years since I realized the meaning and purpose of who I am and what I could do. When I look back, these thirty years seem like the day before yesterday in my experience because it has been going too rapidly."

Excerpted from the Sathsang of 3 September 2012, on the occasion of Sadhguru’s birthday.

It has been thirty years since I realized the meaning and purpose of who I am and what I could do. When I look back, these thirty years seem like the day before yesterday in my experience because it has been going too rapidly. The first twelve years of my life, I was very taciturn, barely spoke, all kinds of things cooking in my head, you wouldn’t imagine – all kinds. Another twelve or thirteen years later, yoga became a part of my life, but I became more and more aware of the world around me, the way it is and the way it functions. And by the day, I became angrier and angrier.

If you are looking for justice, you will die of anger, believe me. There is no other way because there is no such thing in human societies, unless you believe what other people tell you. If you are able to see how people function, what they do within the family, in the social structure, in the nation, in the world, you will only die of anger. So, I was raging within myself. Fortunately, my involvement with finding expression limited itself to attending revolutionary meetings and sticking posters at the university. I did not go to the extent of picking up the gun. A few of my friends did and they went all the way, one of them became a prominent leader and was killed about two years ago. I was so angry with the way the world functions – how much deception, how much injustice, how many uncaring ways of functioning, how human beings treat each other, how human beings treat every other creature on this planet. All this made me suffocated and angry.

If the coolness of enlightenment did not happen, I would have died of anger. There was so much rage in me. I did not display it in my daily life but I think my blood was not at normal temperature. Inside every vein in my body, every artery in my body was burning because I saw discrimination, injustice, deception, just in everything. It took a certain dimension of perception to look at the other aspect of life – not just of human beings – but of the creation and the source of creation. How beautiful it is, how compassionate it is, how absolutely incredible it is. If that dimension had not opened up for me, whatever expression my anger found, I can assure you one thing – I would have been efficient and that would not be good. That is why the spiritual process is so vital for our existence. Either you have to be insensitive or spiritual, otherwise you will only be angry.

If you become sensitive, conscious and not enlightened, it is a horrible place to live. If you are absolutely ignorant, it is quite fine. If you are enlightened, it is fantastic. In between – I have been there – it is not a good place to be. So, what does it take? The spiritual process has always been associated with renunciation. Again, one badly misunderstood word. People think to renounce means, ‘I have to give up everything.’ No, it is like you renounced your mother’s womb to become an infant, you renounced your infancy to become a child, you renounced your childhood to become a youth, you renounced your youth to become middle-aged, you renounced your middle-age to become old age, you renounced old age to become the grave; unless you are already a very grave person. You will anyway do it. If you do it consciously, gracefully, then we say that is renunciation. Otherwise, we say it is entanglement. If you are constantly renouncing – that is, something smaller is falling away and something larger is becoming apparent to you – this is renunciation. Renunciation means you gave up petty things and moved on to bigger things and you continue to do it. This is renunciation; that you are not an entanglement.

The word ‘Sanyas’ creates a lot of negativity in the social structure today because Sanyasis have set such a bad example. Not all of them, many of them have been fantastic – but many chose that as another way of livelihood. People misunderstood because they saw bad examples. I have been mulling over this for a long time now, particularly in the last one-and-half to two years. I know enough about life to know that any human being, if he remains in the right kind of space, can be transformed. An Angulimala, a man who chopped off people’s fingers to count his achievements of robbery and hung them around his neck – he was wearing a garland of people’s fingers and he had gathered hundreds – such a man turned around and became a sage. Today, we know that many who are trapped in prisons have turned into real sages in their own right. And for us, it has been an absolutely incredible journey. Those who are teaching Isha Yoga or Inner Engineering know what this means – the kind of transformation that they see in people in a matter of three or seven days. There is no better joy than that in terms of doing something in the world, the way people blossom right there in just those few days.

I know one hundred percent that it does not matter what kind you bring, if you keep them in the right kind of atmosphere, the right kind of energy, the right kind of influence, they can be transformed into something absolutely incredible and beautiful. Sanyas has been spinning in my head big time, I have been thinking how to bring this forth to people on a larger scale. Right now, somebody has to be a Brahmachari for a certain number of years, but that is not going to happen to everybody. At least your wives and husbands will not allow it, and your life situations will not allow it.

Sanyas does not mean that you have to go away somewhere. Sanyas means you are soaked in a constant longing to grow. If you grow, you are always discarding or renouncing something. Only those who are stagnant can live without renunciation. Those who are growing are always renouncing something. If you do not renounce something, you will not have the next. This is the nature of life. So, an active Sanyas where people can participate in different ways will open up in the next year or so. Wherever you may be, you can be a Sanyasi. You may be married but you can still be a Sanyasi because you have taken a vow, never to be stagnant.

Every moment, something new should happen in your life. Something old should fall away. You must renounce something old and something new should happen to you. If not every moment, at least every day it must happen because if you do not soak yourself in a certain longing, the Grace will go missing in your life. If there is no longing in you, even if the most beautiful things are around you, it will not enter you because the longing is missing.

To create an opportunity for people to be constantly in a space of Grace, to be soaked with this energy, we will create an opportunity called ‘Kshetra Sanyasa’ which means that you take a vow never to leave the energy space. Three dimensions of Kshetra Sanyasa of different levels of intensity will be set up in the coming year.

Love and Grace,
—Sadhguru

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